When Simon Woodroffe, populariser of sushi and self-development, met Lord Archer at a 'do' he knew exactly how to break the ice.

'I said: "We have something in common. We have both seen the inside of North Sea Camp." His jaw dropped.'

Woodroffe's willingness to 'come out' as he puts it - he was convicted and jailed on a cannabis offence - typifies his heart-on-your-sleeve approach to life and work: the two are one and the same to him. He could easily have hidden it: he was 17 at the time, some 36 years ago now, and he served eight weeks.

But Woodroffe, 53, opted to tell his audience at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last summer. 'I decided: why not come out about my last secret?'

Clearly he is no ordinary businessman, even if he is a very rich one. He had an audience because he wanted to talk about personal development, one of his current passions, so he agreed to take part in a series of stand-up sessions. Why should anybody be interested? Possibly because Woodroffe is an entrepreneur with a less-than-illustrious academic record and a multi-million pound fortune.

The son of a brigadier, he says he and his brother were from an 'upper middle-class family but with no money'. They went to public school where the other boys were wealthy. 'I screwed up my education. I can't remember whether I got two or three O-levels but I screwed up after my parents gave things up to send us there. If you ask where the energy comes from, I think that was it. I just knew I wanted to be one of them and not one of us. Everything I have done has been motivated by the desire for financial security.'

The idea for Yo! Sushi, the business that made his name and fortune, came later. A Japanese friend told him to sell sushi on conveyor belts and staff the cafe with girls in short PVC skirts. He dropped the uniform but embraced the rest and the result was queues along Poland Street in London's Soho.

Woodroffe opened his first Yo! Sushi almost eight years ago. The chain grew to 13 restaurants and three bars in Britain, a Dubai branch and a sadly pedestrian range at Sainsbury's supermarket before Woodroffe sold his majority stake to a venture capital company last year. He made £10 million.

'After I signed 43 documents to complete the deal, they asked me where I wanted the money. I gave them my current account number. I went down to the nearest cash machine and all these noughts came up. I turned round to the bloke behind me and said: 'Look at this, this is a Robbie Williams moment'.'

Venture to suggest that is perhaps not only a dangerous habit but also in questionable taste, and he demurs on both counts. The money has enabled him to reinvest in a raft of new projects. Some of it has gone into Yotel, another Japanese-style concept. Tiny but hyper-designed, luxury hotel rooms that will utilise 'space that nobody else wants'. Basements underneath central London car parks, for example, although the first two are planned for airports.

Woodroffe had the idea when flying first class on British Airways. The designers who worked on cabins for the prototype Airbus asked for the job and have charged £15,000 - a snip - for their input. The rooms are like cabins. The bed doubles as a sofa, the bathrooms take up a quarter of the 10 square metre units, and the mood lighting and wi-fi facilities are aimed at professionals who want to work, play and then sleep in luxury that is affordable (£75 a night).

'Yo! Sushi was our first hit record and we are hoping that Yotel will be our second,' says Woodroffe, who has made a real record with the late Ian Dury's Blockheads. 'We' is the team of 'entrepreneurs' he has gathered about him so that he can delegate the running of these projects and go off to think up some more. 'I don't really do this work/ life balance. I believe that if you enjoy your work and it is relatively anxiety-free, you do not need to balance work and life.'

His 15-year-old daughter lives with him (he divorced in 1990) and he says bringing her up is his 'biggest commitment' outside of work. He has no 'hobbies' as such. He is too busy to have a television, though he is involved in plenty of TV projects, such as The Dragons' Den, a business series for the BBC.

'There are too many people who are in jobs that make them unhappy. We have something very unique in this country. We have an entrepreneurial spirit. Gordon Brown coined the phrase the entrepreneurial society and I think he could make it happen. The answer is deregulation. We have to look after the people who cannot look after themselves, but after that we all have a responsibility to ourselves. I hate the nanny state.'

One of his passions is an American scheme recently introduced to schools in Britain. 'The budget is £300,000 and we give schoolchildren real money to start up real businesses. The ones who make money are reinvesting it, although they do not have to. Those who lose their money are just learning that this is the risk in business. Most millionaires have lost it all at some point.'

He is a fan of Brown, not least because of his focus on African poverty. 'Nelson Mandela's wife has invited me to go and look at some immunisation programmes in Mozambique. I'm going to go because I am like a lot of people who could give much more than we do but who do not because we can ignore it.

'It is like a kind of denial. Our problem in the West is that we'll never be secure ourselves while there is extreme poverty everywhere else. William Wilberforce did not work to abolish slavery because it was immoral. He could see that sooner or later the slaves would rise up.'

He talks the language of self-help and he exudes energy. The two are linked. He learned from prison 'never to break the law', even insisting that one of his first cash-in-hand payments as a stage designer went through the books.

He took himself off on development courses in the early 1980s, taking a little from each ('reject the cult') and learned how to think positively. His chosen profession, designing stage sets for the likes of Ozzy Osborne and Rod Stewart, thrust him into 'an anarchic world full of very rich popstars'.

Woodroffe's creed, and he makes a living preaching it to more mainstream businessmen, is decentralisation, not anarchy. He makes a prediction: 'Entrepreneurs will replace celebrity pop stars and footballers as idols for young people. They will look at how you can make money if you have a passion for an idea and you make it work and they will want some of this themselves.'